Firefighters were called to respond at a funeral home after it was caught on fire during the process of cremating an “overly obese” corpse.

Don Catchen, who is the owner of the Hillside Chapel Crematory in Ohio, said that he was alerted to the fire and he immediately sought for the local authorities’ help. The fire was controlled to the garage where the crematory unit is located.

Catchen explained that his employee was in the process of cremating the “overly obese” deceased person when the fat of the body caused flames to engulf one of his units in the city of Cincinnati.

The excess fat in the body burned at a higher temperature will almost always start an unwanted fire outrage, said the city fire chief.

One Funeral Director running a confession blog describes a blaze resulting from the cremation of a morbidly obese person as a “grease fire”.

Luckily, no other parts of the building were damaged, Mr Catchen said, and no other bodies were damaged in the fire.

According to reports, the fire took about two hours to put out, Mr Catchen told local news outletWCPO.

“My operator was in the process of cremating remains and [the body] was overly obese and apparently it got a little hotter than the unit is supposed to get,”Mr Catchen added.

“One of the cremation containers that we had close got caught on fire and that’s what burnt.”, he added.

“We believe there were some combustible storage boxes that were too close to the ovens,”said Cincinnati Fire Chief Michael Washington.

Mr Catchen added the fireproof unit is made of concrete block with a steel roof, but also has a rubberised roof.